The Solar Eclipse: A Non-Inconvenient Truth

We all know how right wingnuts, fossil fuel interests and religious zealots like to deny any science that’s inconvenient for their economic interests and/or belief systems. For instance, for those hell-bent on believing that humans are super speeeecial — that we couldn’t possibly just be another species on this planet, descended from other species and other species…going back to prokaryotes,eukaryotes, cnidarians, Pikaia, ostracoderms, cynodonts, etc. — Darwinian evolution is of course a no-no, as it “lowers” us to the level of all other beings on this planet. Horror of horrors, we’re part of this planet and related to other living things on this planet!!!

Which brings us to today, when tens of millions of Americans will observe a scientific phenomenon – the solar eclipse – that is not being “denied,” that is not having hundreds of millions of dollars spent by corporate interests who feel threatened by it, that makes nobody particularly upset or angry, that basically isn’t controversial in any way. Why not? Because, of course, the solar eclipse is not a threat to powerful, entrenched, wealthy and corrupting corporate interests, as is the case with the science of man-made global warming (to the fossil fuel industry). The solar eclipse also does not appear to be a threat to organized religion, as it might have been in the past, when you could get in a lot of trouble if you claimed the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. Eppur si muove and all that. Today, fortunately, even the most hard-core religious denominations seem to accept basic scientific facts, like gravity or the earth orbiting the sun or bacteria and viruses causing diseases (as opposed to “miasma theory” or “humors“) or…solar eclipses. Now, if only our climate-science-denying and/or evolution-denying friends would extent their “belief” in the not-inconvenient truths into the more-inconvenient (for powerful, wealthy, entrenched interests) truths, we’d possibly be making some progress for a change…

Too bad the Kochs didn’t spend their 100 mil on solar and wind and battery technology and they would still be making tons of money. Their fossil fuel business would not be hurt since we are sometime away from energy independence. There must be some other method in their madness.